In today's enterprise world, as the number and complexity of the components of a computerized environment increase, adding or changing systems or parts thereof are becoming a major decision for an organization.
A system typically comprises basic components such as operating systems and databases, backend systems business applications, development tools for adding applications or services, and communication components for all the above. Once a system is up and running, business content can be inserted and used.
When changing or adding a component, the enterprise has to consider many implications, including compatibility with existing or external systems, direct cost, labor time of organization employees, additional components that have to be purchased or upgraded in order to be compatible with the new ones, future extension possibilities, down-time, possible failures, and the like.
In addition, large organizations usually have to interface with multiple entities or services, such as partners, third parties, customers and others, whose systems may not always operate according to the same standards or technologies as the organization's systems.
A similar problem exists with legacy systems used within and by an organization. Sometime an organization cannot or does not want to replace such systems which perform certain tasks, and new components have to adapt and interface with the older systems, although the technologies used by the systems may be different and even incompatible.
Therefore, an organization may hesitate before committing to a new system or component and would first like to get a feeling of the new offer and how it integrates with other parts of the system. However, most demonstration systems are either merely a facade and not operative systems, or are very general and try to aim at multiple domains, and thus have only very limited operability. Alternatively, custom-made demonstration systems for complex environments require significant resources from both the vendors and the customer, and are thus expensive, and usually again have limited operability. The limited operability does not enable the organization to grasp the full meaning of using the system, the implications, requirements, challenges and opportunities.
Many of today's business systems are using or are moving towards using the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in which systems communicate via the provisioning and consuming of specific services. For example, in the banking world, possible services may include “open a bank account”, “deposit money” or the like, while in commercial applications, the services are more likely to be “add customer”, “perform a sale”, or others.
There is thus a need in the art for a utility which enables for installing and deploying an end-to-end enterprise solution, in a fast and easy manner which does not require special expertise or a long period. The solution should be useful with any standard hardware, such as an off-the-shelf standalone server, and should support service oriented architecture.
The solution should enable a customer get hands-on experience with the full system, and not a limited one, and thus understand not only the technological aspects but also the business aspects and their implications on the customer.